FICTION
Eligible by Curtis Sittenfeld
There are moments in Curtis Sittenfeld’s hilarious reworking of Pride and Prejudice when you may feel the need to fan your blushes and wonder: what would Jane Austen think? Because while the original Elizabeth and Mr Darcy take their mutual antipathy for a turn round the drawing room, Sittenfeld’s go off for afternoon “hate sex”. Sittenfeld transposes the five unmarried Bennet sisters, their matrimonial yearnings, blousy, tactless mother and dry, curmudgeonly father into modern Cincinnati without breaking faith with the original.
In Austen, the two oldest Bennets — beautiful, good-hearted Jane and spiky, forthright Lizzie — are 22 and 20. In Eligible, they are 40 and 38, with New York careers and a history of bad boyfriends, and are concerned about declining fertility rather than a spinsterish fading of “bloom”. Their shallow, vain, maddening younger sisters, Lydia and Kitty, are obsessed with the Paleo Diet, CrossFit and manicures rather than hat ribbons and cavalry officers.
Do you need to be Austen mad to enjoy it? No, but intimacy with the plot of Pride and Prejudice helps since half the pleasure is wondering how Sittenfeld will make twists feel contemporary. What could equal the moral earthquake of Lydia eloping or the youthful folly that sank Wickham? Janice Turner
Borough, 514pp, £7.99
The Sellout by Paul Beatty
Most of us have known moments when everyone else in the audience seems to be laughing uncontrollably, but you sit glumly in your seat wondering what happened to your sense of humour. Be warned: Paul Beatty’s satirical novel — which won the Man Booker prize last autumn — may well prompt a similar sense of bewilderment.
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Beatty’s home-schooled anti-hero, known simply as Me, encounters hard times from the beginning. An African-American raised in a weirdly bucolic corner of Los Angeles, he is subjected to no end of bizarre behavioural experiments by his father — FK Me — an obsessive social scientist who tries to immunise his boy against every aspect of America’s racial codes and ends up being shot dead by the police.
Me embarks on a quixotic crusade of his own, breaking taboos in the most perverse way by reintroducing segregation in his community of Dickens. He even acquires his own slave, Hominy, who is happy to submit to his new “Massa”. “Whites only” signs appear on buses and in hospitals, but it is only a matter of time before Me finds himself facing the Supreme Court.
This hallucinogenic morality tale, conveyed in cheerfully profane language, is a slender novella, with slender characters to match, pumped up to grandiose proportions. By the time you reach the end you feel you have been pummelled into a state of exhaustion by a storyteller who lurches from one improbable excess to another. With its faux-casual references to Jean-Luc Godard, Céline and Kafka, The Sellout is the kind of novel designed to be deconstructed in a university classroom rather than enjoyed by a mere reader.
Clive Davis
Oneworld, 289pp, £8.99
NON-FICTION
Crash Bang Wallop: Inside the Financial Revolution that Changed the World by Iain Martin
There have been countless books on the financial crisis, but in Crash Bang Wallop, Iain Martin puts 2008 in its historical context. Scandals were ever-present in the City, from the South Sea bubble in 1720 to the railway booms of the 1840s and the collapse of Overend Gurney in 1866. Martin races through the City’s formative years, when it “oiled the wheels of Empire”.
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The City’s second incarnation does not start with the Big Bang, but two decades earlier with Siegmund Warburg and the creation of the eurobond market. Big Bang itself was a rather dry, technical affair. On October 27, 1986, trading switched from open outcry to computer screens and markets were deregulated. Martin’s argument is that the moral dissolution from that point (and the scandal count does rise fast) was driven largely by cultural change rather than politics. The bigger American banks snapped up slower-moving British rivals and implanted their go-getting culture in the City. The old guard lament the naked greed that followed — it was the value system that died in the fierce competition after Big Bang, they argue, which ignited the City’s rapacious avarice.
With a journalist’s eye for a good tale and a narrative style that rips along, Martin, a Times columnist, has turned an unloved part of British history about an unloved industry into a fascinating yarn. Philip Aldrick
Hodder & Stoughton, 340pp, £9.99
